Welcome, everybody! Hope you’ve had a good weekend, because it’s Mutation Monday here on the Rules Tip Blog and we’ve got a short, sweet, scaly and inexplicably slimy rules tip for you today, starring everyone’s favourite shark crab Sharktocrab, and Simic Ascendancy!

Sharktocrab has a triggered ability that triggers whenever one or more +1/+1 counters are placed on it. This ability, as it does not specify otherwise, only functions on the battlefield- which is all well and good, you’re not generally going to get counters anywhere else- so that’s mostly clear. But you may be wondering- what happens if it enters the battlefield with counters already on it?

As you may remember from previous posts, entering the battlefield with counters is a replacement effect- there is never a time where the creature is on the battlefield without the counters. However, despite this, entering the battlefield with counters is treated as the counters being ‘placed’ on it, just the same as if you aimed a Stony Strength at it. So if you cast Sharktocrab with Rhythm of the Wild giving it Riot, and you choose to Riot for a +1/+1 counter, it will indeed get to tap something down. Same idea with Benthic Biomancer and Growth-Chamber Guardian.

This gets particularly interesting with Simic Ascendancy– if you cast, for example, a huge Hydroid Krasis, then it entering with X counters will put X counters on Simic Ascendancy too! Though let’s be honest, if your Krasis is putting twenty growth counters on Ascendancy, you were probably winning that game anyway.

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Alistair Crook